400 Sunny Isles closes $33M in sales during first week

A fourth new condo project has been completed in the barrier island city of Sunny Isles Beach in Northeast Miami-Dade County since this current South Florida real estate cycle began in 2011.

Transactions in the 400 Sunny Isles Condominium project featuring a pair of 21-story buildings — known as the East and West towers — with a combined 230 units began to be recorded on Dec. 8, according to Miami-Dade County records.

To date, at least 40 units in the 400 Sunny Isles project, developed by a Delaware corporation led by Inigo Ardid, have traded for a combined $32.8 million. That works out to more than $820,000 each, for an average of nearly $520 per square foot as of Monday, according to government records.

Individual units have transacted at prices ranging from $575,000 to $1.15 million, each. On a price-per-square-foot basis, units have traded from less than $425 per square foot to more than $680 per square foot, according to government records.

Currently, 14 units in the 400 Sunny Isles project are listed for sale at a price of nearly $1.5 million each, for an average of $685 per square foot as of Monday, according to data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange.

Sunny Isles Beach — a popular seaside destination for international and domestic buyers, alike — is the fourth most active market east of I-95 in South Florida, based on more than 3,165 total units announced during this cycle.

The only South Florida markets with a greater number of condos announced during this cycle are Greater Downtown Miami with at least 23,000 units, the Hollywood-Hallandale Beach area with nearly 4,500 units, and the Downtown Fort Lauderdale and Beach market with more than 3,285 units, as of Monday, according to the preconstruction condo projects website CraneSpotters.com. (For disclosure, my firm operates the website.)

It is worth noting that the Aventura market on the mainland across the Intracoastal Waterway to the west of Sunny Isles Beach is the fifth most active market, with 21 new condo buildings and more than 2,625 units announced during this cycle.

Currently, five new condo buildings with 436 units have been constructed in the Sunny Isles Beach market. An additional five buildings with more than 710 units are currently under construction, according to CraneSpotters.com.

Combined, the number of new units completed and under construction represents about 36 percent of the total pipeline of new condos slated for development during this cycle in Sunny Isles Beach.

Nearly a dozen new condo buildings with more than 2,000 units — some 64 percent of the total pipeline announced — are currently in the planning or presale phase of development in the Sunny Isles Beach market, according to the data.  

Overall, South Florida developers have already completed 53 new condo buildings with more than 4,200 units east of I-95 in the tri-county South Florida region of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. An additional 127 new condo buildings with 12,120 units are currently under construction in South Florida.

A combined 230 new condo buildings with more than 32,760 units — about 67 percent of the total tri-county pipeline — are currently in the planning or presale phase of development in South Florida.

The unanswered question going forward is how strong the pool of preconstruction buyers in Sunny Isles Beach will be in the near future given growing expectations of rising mortgage rates, a worsening international economy and a stronger U.S. dollar in the year 2016.  

Peter Zalewski is a real estate columnist for The Real Deal who founded Condo Vultures LLC, a consultancy and publishing company, as well as Condo Vultures Realty LLC and CVR Realty brokerages and the Condo Ratings Agency, an analytics firm. The Condo Ratings Agency operates CraneSpotters.com, a preconstruction condo projects website, in conjunction with the Miami Association of Realtors.